


Take Me Home, Country Roads

by multipurposetoolguy



Series: Almost Heaven [1]
Category: Ex Machina (2015), Logan Lucky (2017), Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Emotional Baggage, Family Drama, Gen, Gratuitous Emotional Crying, Healing, Lovesick Teenagers, M/M, Past Character Death, Small Towns, Underage Drinking, im sorry if this doesnt belong in the kylux tag but try it trust me, mentions of blood and minor gore, this is the crossover that nobody asked for but i fell in love with anyway
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-30
Updated: 2017-08-30
Packaged: 2018-12-21 16:45:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,046
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11948403
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/multipurposetoolguy/pseuds/multipurposetoolguy
Summary: After the events that occurred at Nathan's home in the mountains, Caleb feels he needs to escape back to the sun-baked and beer-sticky West Virginia where he grew up. Some things have stayed the same but a lot has changed since he's been gone, including Clyde Logan, but thankfully not in any of the ways that matter.Alternately; in more ways than one, Caleb comes home.





	Take Me Home, Country Roads

**Author's Note:**

> So! I know what you're thinking, you're thinking- why on earth does this exist? Logan Lucky/Ex Machina crossover, how hard did you hit your head to come up with THAT one? Well, my friends, I urge you to give this pairing a try with me, and I hope it ensnares you with its down-home country sweetness, just like it unexpectedly and ferociously did to me. Or rather, the idea jumped me in a back alley and shook me by my ankles and took all my lunch money, but I'm splitting hairs here. 
> 
> NOTE: this fic doesn't have any outright spoilers for the events of Logan Lucky, for anyone who hasn't seen it yet, but it does spoil some details, I guess? The names of a lot of places and people referenced here are canon, and the names of characters and so forth, so its really just spoiling the world-building of the movie just a little bit. 
> 
> ANOTHER NOTE: If you haven't seen the movie, Joe Bang (Daniel Craig) and his two younger brothers are enlisted by the Logans to help them in their heist, and Brian Gleeson plays Joe's brother Sam. SO, I've spliced Caleb in as a fourth brother and fudged his canon from Ex Machina so that he's from West Virginia, not Portland, but that he did go to college there. So the Bang siblings from oldest to youngest go Joe (35), Caleb (30), Sam (27), and Fish (24, probably short for Fischer? idek) 
> 
> NOTE THE THIRD: Many MANY thanks to my beebz [droneshard](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Droneshard/pseuds/Droneshard) for holding my hand through this and reassuring me that this wasn't a total crack pairing and might be something ya'll will enjoy. Luv u bb <3
> 
> With that all squared away, I hope you enjoy!!

The first thing Caleb had done when he stumbled back into his apartment, twigs in his hair and his hands still shaking, was throw away his laptop. He had thrown it to the floor, smashing its circuit-board guts all over his kitchen tiles and he had physically reeled back when it made him think of Kyoko, peeled raw and broken down in a pool of Nathan’s blood. She didn't deserve that, and he hated Nathan and he hated Ava and he hated that he had loved her, too. 

He didn't know how long it would take for mangled mechanics to stop looking like gored-out entrails, a life-force wrung out and twisted until it flat-lined. 

He threw away every piece of electronic data-collecting equipment that he owned after that, but didn’t crack any more of them open. They went straight into a bin, straight into a dumpster, and straight out of his life. 

Then he did something he hadn’t done since he was eighteen and still smelled like generic dorm room shampoo and too-strong coffee: He packed a bag and drove home to West Virginia. 

 

\---

 

He’d traded in his smart car for a pre-owned Pontiac Ventura, scuffed to the primer in places and painted soap-bar green. It rumbled and hissed and he had to crawl over speed bumps, and it was exactly the kind of change he needed. 

The drive from Seattle to Boone County had taken days, but as the miles slipped away and cities large and small skittered past his rear-view mirror, the paranoia began to seep from his mind and out the window, scattered and dissolved into the warm hay-dry air. 

He rumbles past a wooden sign strung up with faded bunting advertising ‘Wyatt Earl’s Shoot n’ Bait Shop, 5 mi’ and with the rattle of an ornery engine at his feet and too-hot wind in his hair, it’s almost like he never left. Only he  _ had _ left, he reminds himself, had run away to Portland for college as fast as the next bus would take him, then even farther for his prestigious programming job, and had devoted a lot of his time since to not looking back. He wasn’t entirely sure why he’d lied to Ava, why where he came from stayed off his tongue like a same-charged magnet even when talking to someone who technically wasn’t even a person. Why he could talk about his parents’ death but not the fact that they had been driving out of Greenview to the Macy’s two towns over so he could pick out a blazer to wear to his first high school dance, that he'd mowed their cranky old war-vet neighbor’s lawn for a month to be able to afford on his own. 

It's not that he's ashamed of where he comes from, not exactly. He knows it must be universal for a person to feel like they need to shed the skin that everyone back home knows them in and emerge an improved and adapted version of themselves into the great wider-world. He hopes it is, at any rate, if only so he can keep a lock and key firmly on the door in his subconscious behind which hides whatever the hell he’d been running from. 

His left-front tire dipping into a pothole jerks him from his thoughts and he smiles when he remembers it, the same spot it’s always been on the corner of Honeycrest and Blue Brook since before he can remember. For some reason the fact that it never got filled in comforts him, sets some buzzing thing in his chest to settle calm between his ribs. He’d take any sign the universe was willing to give him that this wasn’t a monumentally bad idea, coming back to where so many sleeping dogs still lay.  

As he draws farther into the town proper he realizes all at once that he didn’t really have a particular place to still his tires in mind, that he hadn’t really had a game plan when he set out on his new off-the-grid life past ‘go home and hope it still feels like it’. Speaking of monumentally bad ideas, he definitely can’t go  _ home _ home; not yet, at least. Fish was a little too young to remember too much but he’d always felt like he blamed him for what happened to their parents anyway, and Joey certainly did. If he grew up knowing anything with utter conviction it was that that’s what middle children were for, being martyrs for whatever shit everyone else feels like sticking them with. Sammy was in that boat with him, but once his letters had stopped coming through the campus mail, too long unanswered, Caleb knew he wouldn’t be able to show his face at home unless it was slack-jawed and caked with makeup, peeking out of a casket at his wake. 

Home is out of the question then, but he doesn’t really feel like being  _ that  _ guy that loiters around the old high school to relive his ‘glory days’. Not that anyone would call AV club and a year of homework done from a hospital bed anything close to glorious, but still it feels odd to go back alone as a recently unstable adult. He isn’t sure what other old hangout spots he used to frequent are still around, and he doesn’t really feel like unpacking all of those memories before the car’s engine has even cooled down. What he  _ does  _ feel like doing is getting at least two beers and something greasy in his stomach, so he pulls off of the rickety I-17 and into the sparsely occupied parking lot of a lived-in looking dive called the Duck Tape Bar & Grill just off the highway. 

It seems to live up to its name, the wooden steps groaning under his feet as he stepped up to the door and held together with, wow, that was  _ actual _ duct tape. Inside the place is dimly lit but comfortable, booths tucked along the walls and round wooden tables scattered around the 360 degree bar and overhead glass racks that take up the room’s center. 

The bartender has his back to him as he approaches and sits on a tattered leather stool, and he expects to be asked gruffly what his poison is and handed a Budweiser regardless of what he answers when he finally turns from chuckling with an old man sat on the other side of the bar. 

He definitely  _ isn’t  _ expecting Clyde Logan of all people to turn slowly towards him, as if in slow-motion, a  _ ‘what’ll ya like?’ _ halfway out of his mouth and gripping the counter with one less hand than when he’d last seen him. His whiskey-brown eyes are wide and just as warm as when they were thirteen and breathing in each others’ faces under the railroad tracks, and suddenly he feels sweat prickle his skin in the air conditioned room. It seems home has officially caught up to him, whether he’s ready for it or not.

He doesn’t know what he could say that could follow the staggering gap in time since they’ve seen each other, where to even  _ begin  _ to start, but before he can fumble out the wrong thing Clyde speaks first. 

“Caleb Bang.” 

He nods. Names were a good start, if one he wasn’t expecting to have to backtrack to. But he hadn’t been expecting a lot of things that had happened to him lately, so he supposes he should relax and let life’s tide grab him by the ankles and pull him under. 

“Clyde Logan.”

Clyde shakes his head minutely and scrunches his face up as if Caleb had reached out and flicked his nose, then turns to the rows of bottles to his left, hiding his prosthetic from view. When he speaks again he doesn’t meet Caleb’s eyes, and he can see the muscles in his jaw jump as he clenches it.

“What’ll ya have?”

Caleb blinks. He’d always been able to tell what Clyde was thinking, when they were younger. He’d always wondered how so much feeling could fit inside one person while others looked at him and called him closed off, or buttoned up. But now he peeks at him from the corner of his eye with an unreadable expression, jaw still tight, and just as he’d tumbled back into his life Caleb feels the loss of the keen-eyed soft-hearted boy he used to walk to school with. 

“Uh, just whatever’s on tap is, uh, is fine.” Clyde turns to retrieve a glass and sets it down full on the bar in front of him probably more gently than Caleb deserves. Still he won’t meet his eyes. 

“Shift ends at six, won't do this here. M’out by fifteen after.” He rearranges a few glasses behind the bar before finally, hesitantly raising his eyes. 

Caleb inclines his head and sips his beer, wiping foam from his lip. He can pick up what is handed to him, he’d always been good at that. “Six fifteen, on the front steps.” 

Clyde nods as much for his own convincing as for Caleb’s, it looks like, and closes his eyes, turning to refill the old man’s whiskey sour across the bar. Caleb takes a few haggard gulps from his glass and sets it back down over the edge of a ten dollar bill, doing both of them the mercy of being gone by the time Clyde turns back around. 

It’s barely ten after two, and as long as he has time and nerves to kill before coming back to the bar, he thinks he may as well bite a couple of fraternal bullets and get the brain-splattering out of the way. Hopefully he can wipe enough of it off the walls and shove it back in his ears before facing whatever his conversation with Clyde was going to do to him. 

He takes a few long, deep breaths, squints up into the Virginia sun, and climbs into the cab of his Pontiac, headed for Bennett Lane and his family home. 

 

\---

 

The house looks exactly like it did when he left, which is both comforting and not at all in tandem. The green paint has peeled a little more aggressively in places, but it still looks like the Bang family has never heard of a lawnmower and is content to live in an overgrown sticker patch. 

When he can no longer justify sitting in his car and trying to talk himself out of it, he climbs out and takes heavy steps to the faded front door. He raises his fist to knock and pauses before his knuckles hit the wood. What's the protocol for entering a home that's technically partially yours, but you haven't set foot in for twelve years? Surely he can’t just walk in unannounced, not with how long he’s been away, but nobody knocks on their own front door, not in Virginia, it just isn’t  _ done.  _ Or so his auntie had taught him, but who knows what truths are to be found amongst the placations and fantasies that you’re told when you’re four years old. 

He stands there locked in indecision for a few agonizing minutes, and he hadn’t yet come to a decision whether to knock or not to when he hears raised voices through the door.

_ “Hey! You son’bitch I was watchin’ that! They was about ta arrest somebody!” _

A thump and then a clatter, like a pillow being thrown and knocking over a beer bottle. 

_ “Three pee-em is Desperate Housewives o’clock and you know it, stop destroyin’ the house just ‘cause you can’t remember our tv-watchin’ agreement!” _

Caleb lets out a shaky breath and leans his head on the sanded wood of the door. His brothers bickering, the sun hot on the back of his neck, frogs croaking somewhere off in the creek behind the house; half of him thinks he’ll walk in and be twelve years old again, hair too long and mud on his shorts and in his shoes. The smell of his dad’s cooking would waft in from the kitchen and he’d drool on his Indiana Jones t-shirt. He’d try to scrub it away before anyone saw but Joe would be lurking in the corner of the living room lacing up his Chuck Taylors and he’d snicker. Joe always caught every embarrassing thing that ever happened to him and tucked it away for ammunition in their complex web of sibling rivalry. He’d smirk on his way out the door, going out to some date or to some bonfire with his rowdy friends, pat him too hard on the shoulder and murmur  _ “Try an’ keep it in your mouth, Cay.”  _

If he was going to do this he had to do it now, before it all started to hurt too much and he’d do something stupid like run away again before he’d even fully come back home. He takes another steadying breath, throws his auntie’s advice to the wind, and knocks. 

There is another shuffle of noise and it must’ve been Sam who couldn’t be pried from his program because Fish answers the door, wrenching it back with a gripe that dies on his lips as he stares at him. His eyes are impossibly wide and honestly he wouldn’t be surprised if he doesn’t even recognize him, as much as it breaks his heart. 

There’s a beat of silence, Fish blinking and scrunching up his brow and trying to make sense of whatever situation he’d just opened the door to. He waits so long to speak, in fact, that Sam calls out from the living room, not getting up. 

“Who is it? What they want?”

Fish shakes his head a little and finds his voice. “...Caleb?”

He shrugs and opens his hands in response, the most lackluster ‘ta-da’ motion revealing a most lackluster houseguest, he’s sure. Best to just face the fallout and then slink off to a cheap hotel room and maybe punch a mirror, and more than maybe sit in the bathtub with his clothes on and drink. 

Sam does get up then, the sound of more beer bottles clattering to the floor tinkling in his wake. 

“Caleb? Cay’s home? Wh-  _ move!”  _ He clambers into view and shoves Fish aside so they're both crammed in the doorway, staring at him openly. A stretch of silence passes and he can see Sam flexing his hands at his sides and fidgeting, Fish gripping the door frame and looking wary, and he closes his eyes tight and prepares for whatever comes next. He really would prefer not to get hit, but he wouldn’t blame either of them for wanting to let him have it. 

He startles and trips over his feet when Sam steps out onto the porch and pulls him to his chest in a rough, too tight hug. 

He stands there unmoving for a minute, stunned, and when he comes back to the reality of not being punched but in fact quite the opposite he clings to his brother and breaths into his greasy backwards ballcap. 

Neither of them speak until they break apart and Sam holds him at arm’s length, looking him up and down with a sort of look on his face like he doesn’t quite believe he’s not dreaming. “Missed you, shithead. Where you been?” 

A short, blocky laugh is shocked out of him and he looks both his brothers in the eye before replying, “That is… kind of a long story.” 

Sam just snorts and throws an arm around Caleb’s neck, which he isn’t really tall enough to do, and walks them into the house. Fish pats Caleb’s back as he follows them inside and this is already going better than he’d hoped it would. Small blessings, something else his auntie used to say. 

They end up in the kitchen, Sam thunking down three sweating cans of Miller Light on the table before falling heavily into a chair across from Caleb. He tosses one to Fish where he stands leaning on the door jamb, eyeing them. Caleb traces a ring in the wood with his finger that’s been there since some high school science experiment of Joe’s fizzed over and the chemicals stripped the paint off, and waits.  

Sam pops the tab of his beer and gestures to him with it, then breaks the uneasy quiet of the room. “You always this thin? They got good food out there don’t they?” He takes a sip. “Or is that part a’ your ‘long story’?” 

Caleb rubs his arm self-consciously, aware of how wiry he’d gotten stressing over Nathan’s test and then being locked in his entryway for three days. “Something like that, yeah.” 

Sam sips his beer in thought, Fish doing the same but not taking his eyes off the pair at the table. Suddenly Sam slams his beer down on the table, sending it sloshing out onto the wood. 

“Are you sick? Is that why you’re here, Cay are you  _ dyin’?” _  He’s gone whiter than any sheet in the house and Caleb chokes on foam. 

He thunks his own can down and reaches out a hand towards his brother, palm flat on the table. “No, Sammy, I ain’t-” He cringes at the slip, “I’m  _ not  _ sick, and I’m not dying.” He hadn’t been here for more than a few hours and already the twang he tried so hard to smother was coming back. He’s half afraid that if he stays the night he’ll wake up with a cheek full of chewin’ tobaccy and his lips wrapped around every wide vowel, under some country-fried magic spell. The other half is hoping he does just that. He shook his head to clear it and continued. “I don’t think anything could kill me, at this point.”

Fish wrinkles his brow at him from across the room and Caleb really doesn’t want to explain what exactly he has survived to be here in his family kitchen, so he doesn’t, just holds his drink and waits for one of them to ask him something else. 

Same holds his own drink in both hands and skirts away from meeting his eyes. “Now not to be ungrateful er nothin’ that you’re here, because I ain’t,  _ we  _ ain’t, but if you’re not dyin’ and we’re alright here, then, that is to say, well-”

“Why  _ did  _ you come back? Why now?” Fish cuts in, his arms crossed defensively across his chest and his long hair tucked behind his ears. 

Caleb opens his mouth to reply and realizes he doesn’t know what they want to hear, much less what the version of the truth would sound like that would even attempt to bridge the gap between them that the years have made. 

He gives them the only answer that he can fit in his mouth. “I guess I just… needed to remember who I am.” He looks up at the streaky window panes, the ceiling, the floral wallpaper his mother had loved so much. He looks at his brothers. “I needed to come home.” 

Fish scoffs from across the room. “You needed to come home. Well ain’t that nice, you’re sick of your big city job and your big city friends, and you needed to come home. What about  _ us  _ needin’ things? Where were you when  _ we  _ needed you to come home?” 

Sam turns around to face him. “Damn it, Fish, he’s only just got here, would ya give him a minute to get sitch-ee-ated?”

Fish pushes off the door frame and stalks over. “Yeah, he  _ has  _ only just got here, after  _ twelve goddamn years!  _ But that’s fine, let’s all hug and cry into our fuckin’ beers and go through scrapbooks together.” He whirls on Caleb, who shrinks against his youngest brother’s anger. “Did you know Joey had to work three jobs to feed us after the state stopped sending us money for, for what happened? Bet you didn’t, seein’ as how you were on the first bus outta here soon as your fancy scholarship money came in the mail.”

Caleb blinks. He hadn’t known that, in fact he’d specifically asked about the financial situation at home during the first fledgling years of being away where he’d still tried to call every few months. Joe had said that they were fine, that the state would keep sending them survivor’s benefits until all of them had at least graduated high school. 

But Joe had lied, apparently, really it shouldn’t surprise him, and now they’re doing this, and he’s arguing back if only to get it all out in the open. Maybe then they could all bury this twelve year old hatchet properly. “You can’t blame me for wanting to get out and make something of myself, i couldn’t stop seeing them everywhere-”

“Do you think you’re the only one who missed them? Who can’t fuckin’ go down main street without seein’ all the places they used to take us? You don’t have to sleep next to a window where you can hear the stream out back every night, and dream about daddy grillin’ outside while we swam, and wake up with yer face wet.” Fish sinks down against the counter and sits in a pile on the floor, the fight slowly leaving him. Sam goes to him and puts a hand on his arm and doesn’t move when Fish tries to shake him off. 

Caleb wants to say that he knows first hand that he doesn’t have to sleep by the stream to dream of them and wake up with water in his eyes, but he doesn’t think it’ll help.

“Joe coulda gone and been somebody too, got a letter in the mail same as you did, i saw it in the trash. He’s real good at science, did you know?” He’s talking to Caleb but not looking at him, less angry now and almost wistful, sad. “Chemicals and shit, experiments. But he had to look after us, as no one else was around, and he’s been in prison for almost a year now so it’s been just me n' Sam, alone.”

Caleb can’t look away from the tabletop, can’t face the pain in his brother’s eyes and feel it bounce back and reverberate against his own. “Joe’s in prison?” He can’t make anything else come out of his mouth.

“Yeah, he is. We go an’ see him once a month.” He’s losing steam, tired and hurt and reeling from their past catching up to them just like Caleb is. Sam shushes him and grips his upper arm where he crouches next to him.

So it was true, then, he’d run away to put himself together and shattered his family in the process. Somehow this was worse than if they’d just punched him, his baby brother pushing his knuckles into his wet eyes and Sammy, barely three years older, hunkered down and acting like the parent he should never have had to be. It’s all too much, it hurts too bad, and he has to bite his cheek hard to keep from standing up and marching out to his car, driving out of their lives and leaving them better off without him. But that would only make things worse, and ensure that he really couldn’t ever come back, and he really did need to be here right now. He didn’t know where else he could go.

“I’m sorry,” he says to the table. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I should’ve come back, I should’ve, I should’ve come home-” His voice cracks on the last word as he starts breathing fast and his vision swims. He doesn’t feel like he’s allowed to go to his brothers now, to go to them and huddle close and seek comfort, so he slides from his chair to the floor, meeting them on the same level but keeping his distance. Now they’re all red-eyed and sniffling on the kitchen floor, like his brothers probably did while he was bent up like a bobby pin in a hospital bed and his parents were in body bags. Fitting, then, that is where they should fall apart together. 

With everything laid bare it seems like some kind of truce, Sam looking between them with worry in his brow and caught in the middle. Fish has dried his eyes, clears his throat, and they both crawl over to where Caleb sits slumped against the chair’s legs. One tear slips down to his chin, and then another, and then his brothers are on either side of him, holding him while he loses his grip on himself and the ‘I’m sorry’s fall shaky from his lips like it’s a prayer to save his soul. It certainly feels like one. 

He stops crying after a while and they’re all still quietly sniffling, none of them sure what to throw out into the silence that doesn’t feel as stifling as before. Eventually Sam crawls over to the fridge and rolls some more beers towards them, where they share a watery chuckle a toast to ‘fucking family’.

After a minute of gulping their second round Sam asks, hesitantly. “You uh, you been to see mom and dad yet?” 

Caleb slumps back, laying his cheek on the crown of Fish’s head and smiling when he doesn’t nudge him away. He has not been to see them. He even took a different exit off the highway getting here so he wouldn’t have to drive past the cemetery. 

He reaches up to blindly set his can on the table and meets Sam’s eyes. “I… don’t think I’m ready for that yet.” It’s true, he isn’t, but the understanding in Sam’s face doesn’t hurt like he thought it would because for the first time he feels like he could be, someday. 

After a minute they haul each other to their feet and stand in the kitchen, wiping eyes and tucking hair back into place. He takes a long second to look at each of his brothers, and breaths deep. They may not be yet, but they are going to be okay. 

They sit around the tv in the living room for a while after that, switching it over to the news and catching Caleb up on some of the major changes in Boone County since he left. Soon enough Caleb’s watch reads quarter to six, and he stands to go powder his nose and get ready to leave. 

Bent over the bathroom sink he splashes cold water into his face a few times, trying to calm the nerves that had only just settled back down and were rising back up at the thought of doing this all over again with Clyde. He grabs a folded pink drying towel hanging on a rack and presses it to his face, breaths in deep. He’s finally started building the bridge that leads back to his family, and he tries to let that give him strength. He can’t change what happened or what he did afterwards but he  _ can _ change what he does now, and every day moving forward. There’s still one piece of his family that he needs to mend, so he can try and feel whole again and figure out where the hell to go from here. 

On his way out the door Fish gives him a slow nod and Sam looks up at him like he was still a little afraid that he’d walk out and never come back. He’d assured them that he wasn’t leaving, that he’d be in town for a while yet and that he’d only be gone a few hours at the most. He’d unloaded his duffel bag from his car and dropped it with a cloud of dust onto the twin bed still done up in his old room, Sam and Fish waving away his attempts at going to rent out a room at the inn over on Clearwater. 

With his eyes only a little bit puffy and his head feeling clearer than it has in a long time, he buckles in and peels out towards the Duck Tape Bar & Grill. 

 

\---

 

When Caleb pulls up at five after Clyde is already standing against the railing, arms sprawled out along the wood on either side. 

He climbs out and shuts the door with a creak. “Thought you said six fifteen?”

Clyde just shifts on his feet and stands up straighter. “I did say that,” He drops his arms and takes a few steps towards him. “Figured I’d give you a minute to get here and all. If you was comin’.” 

His gaze is guarded, and Caleb knows he deserves that. He opens his arms and gestures, trying at a smile. “Well, here I got. Where uh, where to?” 

The corner of Clyde’s mouth twitches up and Caleb takes it as a victory. He lets him take the lead and follows Clyde as he walks past him and over to a well-kept black Pontiac Ventura. Caleb throws his head back and laughs. Of  _ course _ he’d pick Clyde Logan’s car of all the makes and all the models in the world to choose from to take him all the way across country and back home, his subconscious betraying him not for the first time and certainly not for the last. 

Clyde shoots him a look across the car’s hood from where he’s unlocking the driver’s side door. “Somethin’ wrong with my car?” 

Caleb shakes his head and gestures to his soapy green one down the dirt a ways, aiming the last of his smile at Clyde. “Not at all, just. Great minds, and all that.” 

Clyde squints over his head at the other car and huffs a laugh, shaking hair into his face as he gets the door open and sinks down behind the wheel. Clyde leans across the cab and unlocks his door and Caleb climbs in, the engine rumbling to life. 

They don’t talk on the ride to wherever they’re going. Caleb peeks over at Clyde as he drives, who leans forward and turns the radio up just loud enough to be comfortable when he meets his eyes. The Ink Spots croon sadly over the rush of warm air through the car’s open windows, and when he picks out the words  _ ‘we’ll meet again, some sunny day,’  _ he doesn’t know if he should laugh or cry. He should really just get used to the fact that he isn’t going to catch a break today. Clyde seems to pick up on it too, and his stony expression smooths just the slightest bit as he drives.  

It isn’t until Clyde pulls the Pontiac smoothly down the weed-ridden gravel of Harrison Lane that Caleb realizes their destination, and it hits him like a baseball bat to the gut. The car pulls into a wide dirt lot and Clyde crawls it all the way to the its far edge before he twists his keys and steps out. Caleb takes a shaky breath, unbuckles his seat belt, and follows suit. 

The old fairgrounds look exactly like they do every year during the off season, empty wooden stalls dotted around the faded gazebo that looms in the center of the wide open field, the whole place overgrown and buzzing with insects. The grounds themselves are not their destination, however, and they both know it. Caleb follows Clyde as he walks along the chain-link fence wrapped around the Eastern-most side of the field, stopping to clear some waist-high weeds from the base of a tall, sun-bleached billboard. 

He offers Caleb the hand he still has, his face eerily unreadable again, and Caleb takes it, hoisting himself the rest of the way up the narrow ladder to sit with his legs dangling over the thin platform, a faded Coca-Cola advertisement at his back. Clyde clambers up and sits the same way, legs hanging over the edge and only about a foot away from him. 

They sit there a minute in silence, legs swinging in the breeze, until Clyde breaks it. “So. Caleb Bang is back in town.” 

Caleb looks over, but Clyde won’t meet his eyes. “So it would seem,” He offers lamely, out of his depth and just trying not to say the wrong words and drop this fragile thing between them to shatter in the weeds below. 

“So it would.” Clyde hums, watching the sun sink down past the treeline. “How long?”

“Long. Foreseeable future sort of long.” Clyde does turn and look at him at that, the disbelief written plainly on his face stinging. He deserves that, too, he reminds himself. 

“Huh. Well, shit.”

Caleb laughs, hollow and without humor. “Yeah, yeah that about sums it up.” 

They fall into silence again, watching the sun paint the horizon in sloppy strokes of light and color. Clyde looks like he’s chewing on words and trying to decide what to say next, where to go from there, so Caleb speaks first, trying to contribute. 

He looks out across the shadowed stalls and booths. “It looks so different from-” He falters.  “From the last time we were here,” He doesn’t miss Clyde stiffening beside him.

“So you do remember,” His jaw is painfully tight again, muscles twitching.

“Clyde I- Of course I remember. It was…” It was the last time they’d seen each other, before Caleb went away. Before something hurt Clyde enough to take a part of him with it, before his brothers grew to resent him. Before he stopped knowing who he was. 

“Yeah.” Clyde’s voice is tight, and Caleb’s chest aches. 

 

_ They were both eighteen, and it was the night before graduation from Valley View. It was tradition in Greenview and in all of Boone County to have a big ho-down at the fairgrounds on their last night of being high school students. There were games and food and drink, music, and every teenager in the county usually showed up, graduating or not. They were always noisy and bright and almost everyone got drunk, and it wasn’t really their scene, but if you were a teen in Boone County you went to the graduation party, plain and simple. So Clyde had pulled Caleb through the bushes, both of them giggling and breath smelling like to many of the wine coolers Caleb had begged Joe to buy for him. They climbed up the thick wooden beam of the billboard, still faded and peeling even back then, and sat with their legs over the edge, thighs pressed close and warm in all the other places they touched. They leaned against each other and looked out at the twinkling lights of the party, all the noise and the people seeming muted and far away, like they were watching from another planet all their own.  _

_ “How do I know you ain’t gonna run off to college and forget about me?” Clyde had asked, squinting at him over a smile that showed every crooked tooth in his mouth.  _

_ Caleb had put a finger to his chin in mock-deep thought and hummed. “You could give me a present, then I could look at it when I’m feeling homesick and need rememberin’,” He’d replied, grinning coyly at him.  _

_Clyde had gone real fidgety all of a sudden, twisting his hands in his lap, and he looked almost scared when he’d looked up and met Caleb’s eyes._ _“I was thinkin’ ‘bout that, actually, about somethin’ I could give you,” Hesitantly he put his hand over Caleb’s where it rested on his thigh, and then with that stern look on his face that looked like he was trying his hand at rocket science and meant he was thinking real hard, he was leaning in, pressing their lips together in a soft kiss._

_ He pulled away, brown eyes wide and shining under the fat moon, and Caleb knew his face looked the same. Before he could think about it he was leaning back in, meeting Clyde in the middle and their lips sliding together awkward and sweet. Caleb sucked in a hard breath through his nose against Clyde’s cheek, and Clyde made a keening noise at the back of his throat that Caleb swallowed. When Clyde’s hand came up to gently cup his face Caleb jerked back, breath stuttering into his lungs and both the kiss and the spell upon them were broken.  _

_ Caleb scooted back, putting distance between them, and put a hand gingerly to his kiss-swollen lips. He felt like an animal caught in blinding headlights, doing something he shouldn’t and about to be smeared across the asphalt for it, and he probably looked the part too. Clyde for his part just looked confused, vulnerable, and seeing his lips as fat and red as his own was too much for him. When Clyde scooted forward, a question on his lips, Caleb scooted back farther, almost to the edge.  _

_ “Cay, what- I, I thought-”  _

_ “I, um, I have to go,” He couldn’t think, he couldn’t pick any one thought over the hundreds buzzing around in his head like angry hornets, and he couldn’t stop to figure out why looking at Clyde right then hurt so much. Why’d he have to do that? Why did this feel so strange all of a sudden, everything was fine before, why’d he have to do that, why did he have to want it so bad- “I’ll see you tomorrow, on the stage. I just, I have to go.” He clambered over the side and started down the ladder, his hands sweaty and slipping on a few rungs. _

_ “Caleb, don’t, don’t go, just- I’m sorry!” Clyde called after him, but he was already almost to the ground, and he jumped the rest of the way down, needed to not be there. He stumbled and skinned his knee on the gravel, but he didn’t feel it, just marched off bloody towards home and didn’t look back. Not even when tears blurred his vision and Clyde’s voice struggled to carry on the wind, begging him to come back.  _

_ After the ceremony the next day Caleb had practically run to the bus stop, a bag packed and his eyes fixed firmly ahead, willing his hands not to shake.   _

 

That had been the last time they saw each other.

Caleb struggles to swallow around the memory, and he doesn’t have to look at him to know Clyde is reliving it too. 

Neither of them says anything for a long stretch, the last dregs of sunlight clinging stubbornly to the treetops as night settles around the valley. 

After enough time has passed that the air doesn’t feel quite so bogged down with the past, Caleb speaks, his voice soft and barely louder than the crickets. "Your arm," He gently reaches out and touches the back of the prosthetic hand, scuffed with use but clean, well-loved. Clyde shifts.

"Iraq. I was 2 miles out from the airport home. Roadside IED. M'lucky it wasn’t worse."

"Lucky, but also cursed," He remembers how Clyde could talk, for hours about that damn family curse, more than you’d hear from him in a week, all in a stern-faced rush about family misfortune and 'bad energy given physical form'.

Clyde huffs a hollow laugh next to him but doesn’t look at him, and he also doesn’t pull his hand away. Caleb’s sits on top of it, gently tracing the lines in the prosthetic with one finger. Caleb wonders how long Clyde waited before shipping out, how long before he started trying to stitch up the wound Caleb tore into him all those years ago. It hurt to remember the look on his face even now, the fear in his gut that had coiled like a snake ready to strike. 

It’s quiet again for a minute until Clyde says, looking out over the overgrown fairgrounds and washed out yellow and blue of the gazebo, "Thought it would make me a feel like a whole person, somethin’ t'focus on. T'fight for."

Caleb lets it sit for a minute. "Did it?"

Clyde blinks down at his other hand flexing in his lap. "Nope."

"I’m sorry." He’s not sure which thing he means it for just then, but it tumbles from his mouth unbidden anyway. 

Clyde shakes his head once, hard. "Wadn't your fault, it was my choice to-"

"I’m sorry I left."

Clyde stops, his breathing loud through his nose and his hair draping over his face. His ears are just peeking through the dark strands and the sight sits in Caleb’s stomach like a rusty truck hitch at the bottom of a lake. 

His voice is soft and strained when he finds it, head still bowed. "...You left. Not even a goodbye, just gone, nothin’."

"I wish I hadn’t, I never should’ve-" He never should’ve made Clyde think he didn’t care, because what scared him so god damned much was how much he  _ did.  _

"But you did. You did."

_ I loved you, and it scared the shit out of me.  _

"I did."

He knows he’s not making sense, this isn’t how things like this are supposed to go, but he can't speak around the lump in his throat and the fireflies and stars are starting to blur together through the wetness in his eyes. Maybe it was contagious, this feeling, because he’s never felt more cursed in his life. Doomed to break Clyde Logan’s heart over and over until he rotted in a pit somewhere, alone. Or backed up onto a hard drive by some rich psychopath and turned into an AI, wouldn’t that just be fucking ironic. 

Clyde blinks up at the sky and moves his hand out from under Caleb’s, putting it in his lap and picking at the plastic.

“Why did you come back, then? Why now?” Clyde still won’t look at him, and Caleb knows he should stop expecting him to. 

He leans back against the billboard, face upturned under what could’ve been the same night as back then, with how big the moon is looming swollen and yellow. “I always thought I was running towards something, chasing some feeling that I couldn’t find here. Turns out,” He turns his head and sucks in a breath when he sees Clyde looking back, hanging on every word. “Well, turns out I was really running away from something. Something that scared me, but that I realized pretty recently isn’t so scary anymore.” Shouldn’t have been scary in the first place, like old Saturday morning cartoons where the monster’s mask is torn off and only a scared, angry man hides underneath.

Clyde’s eyes are shining and Caleb wants to press gentle thumbs over each eyelid, kiss his forehead. Or drown in them, whichever would start to make up for leaving faster. 

“I can understand fear,” Clyde has turned away from him again, but it doesn’t feel cold so much as unsure. “But what I can’t understand is why you were afraid in the first place.” He shifts his weight and grunts, trying to figure out how to say whatever he’s about to say next, and Caleb gives him time to say it. 

“I always thought-” He turns his face up into the moonlight. “I always thought that how I felt about you was obvious. I wasn’t sure, at first, I thought we was just close friends and that’s all there was to say.” He closes his eyes, and his face looks so serenely sad that Caleb wants to cry  _ for  _ him. “But then I started thinkin’ maybe we wasn’t just that, and you kept holding my hand and sittin’ too close like we always done, what was I supposed to think?” 

Caleb wrings his hands in his lap, picks at a cuticle until it’s as raw and stinging as the rest of him feels. He almost misses what Clyde says next, it’s so soft.

“I thought… I thought you felt the same.” 

Caleb turns to look at him to the sound of his heart creaking and splintering under the immense pressure on it. “I  _ did!  _ You have to know I did, but I was scared of just how many fucking things I felt for you and you know how kids talk, what could’ve happened-”

Clyde meets his eyes and there’s a hard and searing resoluteness in them now. “It don’t  _ matter  _ how kids talk, or what  _ anybody  _ thinks, and you know Joe woulda been on anybody that said shit with his slugger and steel-toes. So long as we had each other-”

“For a long time I  _ didn’t  _ have you, Clyde!” He doesn’t meant to raise his voice, but everything is catching up to him and he is struggling to keep up. 

Clyde is stunned into silence, lips snapping up into full-mouthed frown. He holds his eyes for a long second before looking away, knowing what’s coming.

"You got so quiet, after you came home. No matter what I did I couldn't get you to give me much more than the time of day.” Clyde had been different, when he got out of juvie. He was more reserved, didn’t talk as much, mostly just stayed at home when they weren’t at school. It was like he went from having carnival lights behind his eyes to one, flickering candle. It broke Caleb’s heart, and he had missed him more than ever. Eventually the pieces of their friendship slotted back together, but not in the same ways, and it was hard not to keep feeling the time lost between them. 

"I didn't want to drag you down into my family's misery, I knew you had your sights set on places that weren't here and I wadn't gonna be the one t'hold you back." He pauses. "Even if I didn't want you to go."

"I didn't need protectin', I needed my best friend!" Silence hangs billowing between them, only the fuzzy-vinyl sounds of the night settling in around their hideaway. Clyde is staring at him, wide-eyed and with his lips pushed up into a frown like his mouth is full of marbles. The fight starts to leave him, trickling out from his fingertips and down into the night. "I thought we were drifting apart, and then not much later my parents..." He rubs his eyes hard and blinks out at the stars, memories hazy and too sharp all at once, making his head swim and his tongue loose. "You're not a curse, Clyde, and you never were. Not to me." He reaches over and places a hand in the crook of Clyde's arm, gentle and warm. An olive branch, a hand up, anything he could get. "You were the best thing about this place. I'm just sorry it took me leaving to realize it." 

After a minute he slowly takes his hand away, setting them in his lap again. He looks down at his hands, tracing a scar on his left palm that he’d gotten falling out of a tree when he was ten. He and Clyde had thought they could build a treehouse, all on their own. They never got much farther than a couple of two-by-fours nailed at odd angles amongst the leaves, and a lonely rope swinging in the breeze. 

He startles when Clyde scoots closer, a determined look on his face, and then he’s reaching across his lap with his right hand to wrap it around Caleb’s, firm and warm. Caleb blinks up at him, and he could cry at the small smile creeping across Clyde’s face. Then he remembers where he is, who he’s with, and that he’s spent most of the day crying already. So he does, he lets the tears fall, and Clyde lets go of his hand only long enough to wipe them away with the wide pad of his thumb. 

“I’m glad you’re not runnin’ anymore,” Clyde squeezes his hand and Caleb feels like it’s the only thing keeping him from floating away into the night. “And I’m glad I’m not either. Maybe we can both stay put for a while, huh?” 

He’s smiling at him, and Caleb finally feels like he’s allowed to smile back, so he does. 

He smiles at him, through his tears and his regret and all their lost time, and he doesn’t stop smiling for the rest of the night. 

Here, in Boone County West Virginia, up on a billboard under the stars with Clyde Logan’s hand in his and his breath in his face, is where he belongs. 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Phew!! I know, I'll bring out the tissues ;__; 
> 
> thank you so much for reading, please let me know if you liked this or if it's totally crack anyway, and feel free to come find me on tumblr [@multi-purpose-tool-guy](http://www.multi-purpose-tool-guy.tumblr.com) if these boys stole YOUR lunch money and you wanna yell about them!! <3
> 
> Also donut's southern accent is a cryptid but I've seen it, it beat me up behind a denny's once (he did it in true grit and it was wonderful, and brian's is so good in this movie!!)


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